Baby chores

I know what you're thinking... Baby chores? Seriously?

That's right, somewhere between 18 months and two years, my little one gets his first chore. Having a very simple chore at that age is more of a fun, learning toy than an actual chore.  I always start with the same one... sorting out the clean silverware from the dishwasher. I've started with baby number one years ago, and now, baby number 8 is just starting to take part in the family chore routine. Asher, at 16 months, is learning to help his big sister Grace sort silverware. He is so excited to do it, too!

After Grace takes out the sharp knives and oddball utensils, like spatulas and vegetable peelers, Asher sits up on the counter with the silverware holder and sorts the forks, knives, and spoons into crocks. We used to have them stand on a stool and put them into a silverware holder in the drawer. On the advice of my sister, and for accessibility from the breakfast bar, we just use crocks.

Sorting is very good for their baby brain. Sorting silverware is kind of like sorting blocks, but has more purpose :).  As he's getting used to his new chore, we give him lots of praise and "good job"'s to keep him motivated.  At that age, kids LOVE the approval and attention. If he has too many to do, we will help him out while he's still sorting, but we try not to let him just quit before all of them are done. Learning to finish a job is an important factor in training.

Asher loves to help with his new chore, and fusses and cries when we get the silverware holder out of the dishwasher if we don't put him on the counter right away so he can start sorting.

Next chore (when the fine motor skills improve)... folding kitchen towels and washcloths.

Off Duty

It seems like I am forever changing my method of handling chores.  I think part of it is because we just get bored with our routine. Or I do, at least. Sometimes we have chore chart spreadsheets for each kid that they check off daily. That works well as long as we check them each night to make sure they're getting done. We've also rotated chores every couple months to give some variety, but my poor husband had trouble knowing who does what, so we've pretty much nixed that idea and keep the same chores for longer periods. Right now, I've settled on a list that I can tweak every so often, and is posted in a sheet protector taped onto our cabinet right above my stove area so it's a cinch to look at.

I've also learned through experience (and because I generally stink at remembering things) that it's much easier to have our chores "attached" to something that we do on a daily basis. For instance, every day, we eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so we have chores that need to be done right before or right after a particular meal. This has helped so much because as I'm preparing the meal, I can look at the sheet on the cabinet and make sure so-and-so feeds the dogs (or collects the eggs, or empties the dishwasher, or...).

Along with normal daily chores for everyone, each of the kids are assigned to one day a week for what we've recently named their "serving" day.  They serve the other members of the family by having some extra chores on that day.  Their day includes things like lighting the wood stove and keeping it stoked (then filling it at the end of the day for the next person on the following day), loading all the dishwasher into the dishwasher throughout the day, and doing their own laundry (completely. Which means getting it put away as well.) They do these things along with their other assigned chores. 

In addition, I had each of the kids pick out 4 days worth of meals to make on "their" day. They could pick a breakfast, lunch and dinner that they want to make for each of the four days.  With each of the 5 bigger kids (currently age 8 and up) choosing meals, the month's menu was pretty much filled in. Saturday is our leftovers day and Sunday is our bigger meal of roast chicken or roast beef (that can cook in the roasting pan while we are at church). The meals that they pick are ones that they like, yet are out of our master meal list or cookbook, so we are not eating hot dogs or mac n cheese every night. We also tried to keep the repeats to a minimum. Pizza was one of the few that made the list a few times.

Last Monday, Caleb's day, I was uninvolved in the dinner making for one of the first times ever. Whoo-hoo!  I think maybe they've patched something together when I had a newborn, but this was a real meal. You know, a main dish-veggie-side dish kind of meal.  He's studying Mandarin (Chinese), so he wanted to make a Chinese dish.  Sesame chicken, stir fry veggies and rice... all while I found something else to do (like there's never anything else on the list to do, right?). I think I read library books to the younger kids or something like that. (We LOVE good books! But, that's another blog)

Most of the kids ate with chopsticks that we salvaged from... wherever. 

Looks pretty authentic to me... and tasted deeelish!

Braces...She's got 'em.

Gracie is blessed to have teeth like her momma... well, not so much.  It's a terrible trait that she's inherited.  I don't think my teeth were quite as bad as hers.  She had to have two little crowns when she was 4 years old because of deep cavities, and we've been waiting for all of her baby teeth to fall out because almost everyone of them has a cavity. When her permanent teeth did grow in, they grew in big and beautiful, until they started crowding eachother out of the way.  Her two front top teeth have been pushed to the side, which make her left front almost in the middle. 

We debated a while as to whether we should start braces this early (at age 8). It seemed that anyone who has braces early, ends up getting them again later. After a trip to the orthodontist for her evaluation, I realized that starting them early was probably the best decision.  It will help make room for the other permanent teeth to grow in and help the gums not to look so funky after she gets the braces off (the second time).  Yes, she'll most likely have to have two sets of braces...

In order for them to start, we were supposed to have one of her baby teeth pulled because it was in the way of getting things started. We waited a couple months to see if she could loosen it by hand and pull it out. She had loosened it a lil bit, but it was still attached pretty well, so we made a make-shift dental chair by laying her on the bed with a pillow and used a bent needle-nose plier to kind of twist it out. We were all excited to show dad the tooth that we extracted!

The Before Picture

As for the actual braces, she was so excited to be getting them! Seriously. She was counting down the days since Christmas. Everyone kept telling her all of the foods that she wouldn't be able to have, but it didn't deter her at all.  Caleb already has braces, so she was pretty prepared on what to expect.

Grace getting her braces put on, and Caleb, in the background, waiting to get his tightened.

A mouthful of metal :)

And the After Pic

She's had the braces on for a couple weeks and still loves to show them to everyone. I think she looks super cute with them. 

Superboy!

My little guy got Superman pajamas from Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas this year.  One day, about two o'clock in the afternoon (yes, still in jammies... one of those days), he asked me if he could run around in his underwear.  "Um, no."  He replied with something like, "but Superman does."  He did have a point. Nice role model, huh? Anyhow, I still said "No, you cannot run around in your underwear." So... a few minutes later, he improvised.  He does look quite superhero-like (only we came to the conclusion that his underwear should've been blue).  :)

Puppies!

We got an early Christmas present this year... 6 adorable puppies!

We had seen a new Chocolate Lab-looking dog hanging around the house earlier this fall, so I kept it in the back of my mind that Minnie, our Great White Pyrenees, might be expecting.  I kept looking at her every so often, but didn't notice any great size difference aside from what I expected with winter coming.  Pyrenees' are livestock guardians that are used to life in the highlands of Europe.  They have a double coat of fur because they were bred to work at nighttime and in the bitter cold weather.  Like any other outside animal, they naturally stock up on fur before winter, and shed it in the spring/summer because of the heat.  What I thought was excess fur was actually a bunch of pups.

As we were getting ready to head out the door at the end of November, Ellie, who had been playing outside, came running in saying something about puppy sounds coming from under the porch.  We all went running to the door and very soon, there were 8 eager heads peeking under the porch to get a look at (and a count of) our newest additions!

Try as we may, we just couldn't get a good look at the puppies because of where they were at.  We were only able to confirm, by peeking down through the cracks, that Minnie did indeed have new puppies. We LOVE having baby animals around the farm!  It's such an exciting thing!

A couple days later, when we had time and Minnie was adjusted to her little ones, we found them a new, slightly warmer place. We put them on a nest of hay in a somewhat sheltered part of the barn that had an open door so that our guard dog could still get in and out.  (We've tried locking her in a stall before when we needed to and she literally dug through gravel and under the door to get out.) They were SO cute! They looked like jumbo potatoes with stubby legs when they were born.  After a couple weeks, they morphed into guinea pig looking puppies, still with very thick bodies and short legs. We had 2 girls and 4 boys.  Two black and white, three solid black with white socks and chest, and one adorable brown and white pup that had the markings of a St. Bernard.

The kids spent a lot of time playing with them (even in the very cold weather) and each of them laid claim to a puppy as their own, but obviously, we can't keep all of them.  They'd probably end up eating more than our own family!  So at 6 weeks, we put the fluffy little pups up for adoption.  At that point, they were all eating solid dog food (mixed with warm meat broth... hey, they are out in the cold. It's the least I could do... and, it is very healthy for them).  Within a few days, 5 of the 6 were claimed and taken to their new homes. We were very partial to the St. Bernard-looking boy and if he was the last to go, we probably would have kept him, but he wasn't... The last big, little guy was deep black with white socks and a white bow-tie on his chest.

We felt so bad that he was all alone that I (caved and) told the kids that if he didn't go to a new home soon, we could just keep him. The kids were all excited and had named him Samson. After thinking it through and talking to Paul, it really didn't make sense to keep a puppy in the coldest part of the winter (when the kids are not as likely to go out to play with him). We have no inside dogs, and we not planning to start, so he would have to live outside. We also are not fully fenced in, so I was worried that Minnie would teach him her bad habit of traipsing through the neighboring fields. With that in mind, a lovely family contacted me within the day and asked to see him. I agreed, and off he went to his new family. The kids were not quite as happy as I was, but I filled them in my plan to use the puppy money to get a new male Great Pyrenees puppy later in the year (when the weather's warmer).  Knowing that we'd have a new puppy, and possibly a litter of pups in the future, they were not so disappointed.